The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Similarly, issues identified with respect to one or more approaches should not assume to have been recognized in any prior art on the basis of this section, unless otherwise indicated.
Numerous compression techniques are used to compress video and image generation, typically due to costly memory accesses. The prior art typically teaches that a compression may be lossless, i.e., all information is recoverable, or lossy, meaning a portion of the information cannot be accurately recovered. For z-buffer compression, a lossy compression may mean generating artifacts on an image which would be immediately noticeable. Therefore, a lossy compression is typically undesirable for such uses. It would be advantageous to reduce the memory accesses to z-buffer memory, without the undesirable effects of a lossy compression scheme.